Exactly as printed, 1905
The late Archbishop Magee was once asked, or rather volunteered the reply, that "the two things which tired him most in his clerical administrative consecrations, were the hymn, 'The Church's One Foundation,' and cold chicken for lunch afterwards." As compared with lean beef, which contains eighty-six grains of proteid food in an ounce, the flesh of the common fowl contains eighty grains.
In cases of wasting, bloodlessness, and great prostration of strength, the fresh blood of animals, such as fowls, mixed with warm wine, or milk, punch, warm lemonade, or coffee, and taken immediately, or before its coagulation ensues, proves highly useful. It relieves extreme weakness (as in a case of flooding), restores the bodily warmth, and circulation, acting better, and more promptly, it is said, than transfusion of human blood from vein to vein. The fresh blood of two or three chickens should be given thus in twenty-four hours, according to the authoritative advice of a leading medical text-book. But in refutation of this advice, Dr. R. Hutchison now enters his protest as follows: "Blood is a dilute fluid in animals, and man, having in every 100 parts from 78 to 82 of water. It is not of itself the food of the tissues to which it is circulated in the body, but merely the vehicle by means of which nourishment is carried from the intestines to the places where it is required in the body. One might as well expect a spoon to be of nutritive value because it conveys food from the plate to the mouth." Two French experimenters found that fresh blood when administered to dogs, even in the liberal allowance of two pounds daily, did not suffice to maintain the life of the animals for more than a month. Blood, in fact, from a chemical point of view, is not so much thicker than water after all; in its solids there is plenty of proteid (primary food), but the other nutritive constituents needed to sustain life, as fat, and sugar, starch, and glucose, are only in quite an inappreciable amount. Furthermore, the red colouring matter (hæmoglobin) which makes up the larger part of the proteid, is a substance which is very far from being completely absorbed. Thus it happens that though blood may be used dietetically without much harm, yet at the same time it will be without much benefit, as given in black puddings, and similar culinary preparations; this being true also of the use of animal blood for the sick as a source of iron.
Importance should be attached to the proper and wholesome feeding of fowls which are served for the invalid. They are affected healthfully, or otherwise, as to their quality of flesh, by the care exercised in feeding them, and the character of the fodder which is supplied to them. Recently a French experimentalist kept some domestic fowls in cages, exclusively on hashed meat (previously stripped of sinew, and fat), with as much water as they liked to drink. At first this diet seemed to suit well enough; but after some time (in from three to five months) the fowls began to show positive signs of gout; their legs became weak, and their gait uncertain; their joints were seen to be manifestly swollen, whilst on some days the birds remained lying down, and would not take any food. Attacks of this nature became more and more frequent, and finally the fowls grew thin, and died. Deposits of urates were found around the joints, as well as in the sheaths of the tendons; likewise some in the kidneys. A doctor in Paris ascertained that the administration to a hen of any medicament results in a similarly doctored egg, and he recommends the faculty of physicians to make a practical use of this discovery. It has naturally elicited scornfully humorous comment :- "In dealing with the modern egg Please pause e'er you begin it.
Meals Medicinal, 1905. Public domain; transcription unaltered.